A hurricane of middle class Mainer revenge

Let her rip!

The typical cry of “batten down the hatches” applies of course to the last stronghold the native Mainer has along the coast: commercial fisheries. But to the rest of the residential southern Maine coastline, that over the last fifteen years has been completely usurped by folks from away, bring on the wrath.

Over the course of this week’s media build-up to stormageddon, it was insinuated more than once from a few different sources that we Mainers were taking talk of a devastating storm with a grain of salt. It was assumed that our general malaise was the result of forecasts over the years promising great devastation, but that ended instead in a tipped-over Adirondack.

I see our “pfft” attitude as having a more sinister underlayment. See, back in the 1980’s during our local and state government’s push to build utopia and provide Ramen noodles to “less fortunate” people, also mostly from away, that were too busy making children to achieve full employment – coupled with the Federal government’s decent in to the double-D bosoms of the corporate banking coffers that allowed for inflationary bubbles that included real estate; Mainers who for generations had enjoyed their summers along the coast in cottages built by their forefathers were forced to flee inland.

The property tax bills kept creeping ever higher. First we got to the ten thousand dollar per year mark, then came fifteen. When they got so high, the Mainers still hanging on to the cottages they loved so much were forced to rent out their properties when finally, after only being able to enjoy them for only a few weeks in the year or not at all in order to collect enough to pay the government, we sold them to the rich folks from away who had been renting them.

In the fifteen or so years since most Mainers were forced from the coast like a Kurd in northern Iraq, our cottages have been replaced in large part by glorious McMansions, forever transforming the look of our residential coast, and forever leaving it deserted from September to May.

We remember or have heard stories from family about the devastation caused by the last major ocean storm to cause catastrophic damage, the Blizzard of 1978. Mainers, still mostly occupying the now gated-communities, rebuilt, repaired and fortified the old cottages. The little cottages that made it were of a different cloth and for the most part, the Mainers that owned them could make the repairs on their own. The McMansions don’t stand a chance, and the wealthy folks can’t so much as even roll paint on a wall. Guess who they’re going to have to turn to, to rebuild?

Add to that the logic of renowned economist and NewYork Times columnist Paul Krugman's recent tweet after this week's east coast earthquake; "People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage," and put in motion you have the makings of the ultimate middle class Maine revenge: Jobs!

So let her rip! We'll look at the pictures of the homeowners surveying the damage with one foot out of the Benz and one ear in the blackberry and we'll get to work when the phone calls they make go to the thousands of Maine businesses that will serve to put everything back together.

Of course, if this puppy pushes hard inland, we're all in trouble. I guess I'll bring in the Adirondack from the field where I have beach flashbacks - just in case.

Be safe everyone!

Go-Go Gadget Column!

  All five of you who don’t skip over the opinion page with the sometimes asterized banner atop it may have wondered what happened last week to this very column. Did “they” get to him? Was he silenced for daring to write against the empire? Did he get magically selected for an IRS audit for stating the fact that people here in Portland might be feeling a tad revolutionary?

  Actually, none of the above has happened… Yet. No, instead my column fell victim to the almighty Netflix.

  I plugged back into the grid, fired up the Wii for the first time since I bought it two years ago, and found exactly what the doctor ordered for the (greater) depression-era summer staycation: Inspector Gadget.



The inspector.

   That’s right. They’ve got all 86 episodes of the 1983-1986 hand-animated gems. So, instead of following the corrupt federal corporation posing as government, the inept state government reporting (surprise, surprise) revenue shortfalls from budget forecasts and our city’s clustereff.portland.gov taxation extraction machine; I followed Gadget, Penny, Dr Claw and the comedic stylings of Brain the dog.

  So I had nothing to write about, and I loved it. I can see why the last 30 or so years have been so great for the average American. I had not a care in the world. I consumed beverages high in high-fructose corn syrup, gained 5 pounds on five different varieties of Drakes snack cakes and even read an US magazine to satisfy my news appetite. In it, I even got to see a scantily-clad Miley Cyrus romping on the shore of some exotic locale smoking a butt. Did you know she smoked menthols? Hot.

  As the week wore on, I felt I had separated myself enough from reality to be able to fully function in what is now considered society. I even read a story about a recent visit by former first lady Barbara Bush to the children’s hospital at Maine Med without once even thinking about the irony of naming a center that heals children after the matriarch of a family whose member’s policies and warmongering directives over the years directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children around the globe. Not even once. The kids looked so happy in the picture accompanying the story. Isn’t that cute!

  I no longer felt estranged from society. I could log on to Facebook, and finally commiserate with what I used to consider one-time acquaintances, but now my true friends, about having “a case of the Mondays,” or even the excitement that comes with the Friday afternoon release from corporate wage-slave prisons – Err, rather – Can anyone say “Happy-hour time!?!” Bloomberg in my “news feed” reporting market volatility and Reuters on there spouting this or that about how the Fukushima meltdown is starting to look like a classic China Syndrome scenario and how experts are saying it’s about to set off a chain reaction and life on earth is basically effed? Um, I totally clicked the X and removed that drivel from the feed.

  I even saw postings from friends celebrating the success of rebels in taking down the evil Ghadaffi regime! “Go America!” they were yelling in a nutshell. I liked that my new Netflix-enchanted self didn’t stop to consider how the dictator was taken down not because he was evil, which he was, but rather because he dared to switch from basing his oil sales in dollars in favor of the euro and had recently entered into an agreement with China to sell them Libyan oil. No time for that kind of thinking – Big Brother is on, and Matt might get the boot this week. I figured I would tune back in when the real big brother got around to hanging Mohammar Saddam-style; Dangling the carrot of the noose on the screen and then cutting away right before the floor was dropped out from underneath him. That was fun, right? Totally.

  So as you can see, I was enjoying my week off from thoughts of anything based in the situation of now, which ‘taint pretty and is heading rapidly toward a state of global chaos. I was having so much fun I was willing to stay in this state until I was lying in the burned-out basement.

  Then it happened, an unmistakable sign of the end of days. Higgins is running for mayor. Suddenly, thrust back into reality by thoughts of cheesy-poofs and stinky feet in council chambers, I had no choice. The command was issued from the back of my mind: “Staycation over; Go-go gadget column.”

  See you next week.

The Dow and the ‘R’ word

  Did anyone find Tuesday’s newspaper headlines reading “Markets Soar,” and “Dow posts biggest gains since 2009” as amusing as I did when I first saw them trickle to out to newsstands at 2am that morning? The markets, coming off a huge decline of 634.76 points Monday, managed to eke out a 429.62 point recovery Tuesday. Still being down doesn’t say “soar” to me, but to a populace that the government and their paradigm-defending media treat like short-attention-spanned children, a headline implying great improvement and including positive keywords was just the trick to kick the can and cross a finger another day.

  And kicking the can has really been what the last ten years have been all about. Though not showing itself in an obvious way until autumn 2008 and its recent return to undeniable decline this week, the greater depression that took hold in early 2001 has now advanced to the point where it is no longer possible to artificially inflate the economy by the inventive financial means so masterfully created by the banking sector with the help of loosened regulation.

  As I discovered through recent, totally random conversations, Portlanders are really starting to notice this whole “collapse” thing.

  When I decided that something “just isn’t right,” a few years ago, I went off the “media grid” of smart phones, Hollywood entertainment and spoon-fed news and learned through hundreds of hours of research that in a nutshell the entire globalization experiment launched in earnest after World War 2 is now in the throes of collapse, beyond repair and is disappearing without anything in the wings to replace it. Our federal government, which was co-opted by the corporate globalization movement, has proven ineffectual and at the highest levels has shown time and again to be overtly corrupt. There is no fix for this system – and we’re all just sitting by idly waiting for what’s next.

  Although no one but perhaps the much ballyhooed “top two percent” of earners laments the loss of the trickle-up society they helped create over the last 50 years, the scary thing for the people I’ve talked to seems to be not knowing what’s coming next. It’s what scares me too.

  I was down at the recycling lot down in Bayside last Saturday talking with one of the guys I know who works for the city, shooting the fecal matter, if you will, about the recycling rumor mill and the new city manager, when the conversation turned toward the economy. We both agreed that things were bad, going to get worse and he mentioned how he was worried about his family’s security as they continued to worsen. He offered an anecdote about last winter’s ice storm and how during it there were four (what he considered to be) unsavory people he didn’t recognize hanging out around his house on Broadway in SoPo. The roads, being totally un-passable, would certainly be difficult to navigate with an emergency vehicle if the suspicious looking dudes decided they wanted to pay a visit and he needed help. He said that he had no way to defend himself, wife or kids – and told me he was thinking, with the hard times ahead in mind that are sure to include a lot of hungry and angry people, of getting a gun for just such an occasion. Without any prompting from me, he mentioned there could even be a revolution in this country if things continued to get much worse. We both ended the conversation agreeing that as long as we were both still running into each other while on the job, things were okay for at least the two of us.

  Then, Monday night after the big Dow decline, I was sitting in my driveway with my son on the tailgate of my truck when my neighbor walked by and stopped to chat. He was with his two boys and we started talking about some of the great fishing his older son had done this year and some of the all time great fishing spots in the state. I asked him how his business was doing, and he said he was having an excellent summer. I told him that was great, because things were tough out there. He agreed, saying that a lot of guys were losing their shirts in the markets and at the register. Then, he turned to be and said “Things are so bad out there, there could even be a revolution” and “A lot of guys I know are saying it.”

  These two “R-word” conversations in particular and others I’ve had around the city recently in general made me feel better because I no longer felt alone. They also scared me because by showing me more and more people were starting to see that this surreal socioeconomic choo-choo we’ve been riding in during this “lost decade” is about to hit the big wall of whatever is next at three hundred miles per hour, the chats made our situation seem more “real.”

  Of course, we didn’t need the Dow drop to tell us that. Sure, it murders our 401k plans, but for the big money, it’s a number that really only effects the so-called two per centers in the wallet. Our wallets already empty, the rest of us feel the impact of collapse like a brick dropped on our collective heads from the top of the Observatory.

  Looking ahead, will some great, currently unknown leader step forward to tell us what’s next, or are we going to have to collectively design whatever it may be on our own? Things will unveil themselves and the natural course of the universe will answer that soon enough. One thing our society’s next evolutionary step is not; is a return to the ways of the late twentieth century we all thought we loved, but turned out to be a mirage that provided the population with a Matrix-like image of an idealized society. It turns out that behind the scenes, while we were taking the Taurus wagon to Disneyland with Bon Jovi blaring, clever elitists were working to squander everything that made America great until there was nothing left. Thomas Jefferson said it best when he correctly prophesized this very moment, saying: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currencies, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their prosperity until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." So they have, and so we are. And, unless we figure out how to stop them, our children don’t even have a chance.

  Whatever is coming next, it is time to get past the denial stage, come together and get ready for it.

The Volvo 240 invaded Portland in 1974 and never left!

  When I’m driving around the West End, I don’t notice the relatively clean streets, tree-lined corridors and well-kept buildings. I notice the unusually large number of Volvo 240s.

  There are the ones that stand out, like the unusually beat-up, rear-bumper-on-the-street white sedan parked on Danforth Street or the primer black GL in the Andrews Square area. The others are all well kept and otherwise nondescript. While especially abundant in the West End, they are everywhere in Portland. So much so, it makes me believe Portland has the largest human-to-Volvo 240 ratio in the United States.

  It makes sense. The Volvo 240 is a lot like us. Our city is old, not perfect, but it always runs - reliably at that. It goes in the snow, but slips a lot without the proper traction. Like when our public services department recycles materials from dismantled areas for new sidewalks, you can easily switch out your own parts with a 240 junkyard victim. (Rest in peace, junk yard Volvos. If you were in Portland, this wouldn’t have happened.)

  Anyone who has ever grown up with, been in or driven the 240 in the rest of the country seem to care a lot less about the 240 than people do here in Portland. Maybe it’s because the people here in their mid twenties to mid thirties, the latest caretakers of the fleet, are letting everyone in on the fact that they now know what the older 240 skippers felt while sailing the streets of the city. The feeling you get when driving these machines is much like the feeling you get living in Portland – A feeling of safety; A feeling that no matter what happens anywhere else, (or in an accident with another car on the road,) everything is going to be okay here.

  Whatever it is, I’m glad to see them all out there. I grew up in a 240 family. There was the maroon 1980 244 DL when I was real little, followed by a silver 86 Turbo. When I got my license, I went on to have a couple of my own. I had an 88 sedan and an 83 2-door DL coupe. I loved them all.

  But as technology improved in vehicles, so too did the safety features. Those of us who started families needed to take advantage of airbags and “latch” systems (car seat fasteners) for little ones in the car. Sadly, we had to relinquish our guardianships to the next generation. Thankfully, the next generation took on the task.

  So the unofficial-Official car of Portland, the Volvo 240, lives on for another ten years. The car that perfectly represents both the city and our feelings for it also occupies its boundaries more than anyplace else. We should make it official and proclaim it on the books. We could have a festival with them all on display lined up and down Deering Oaks. Just think how cool the city seal would look with a 240 flying out of it beneath “Resurgam”!

  So, next time you see a 240 around town, thank the driver. Praise them if they have one with the four headlights. Bow to them if their 240 is even older and has two round ones and denotes the number of doors in the badging. They are preserving part of the street art landscape and motorcar tradition that makes Portland so unique.